The sixth edition on the following year was memorable as well. I had the chance to meet a few more colleagues and establish a partnership with the nice folks at the ActiveDelphi magazine. Four articles were published out of this partnership and a fifth is due out in the June/2010 edition.

The seventh Firebird Developers Day this year will definitively taste new to me. For the first time I’ll go up on the stage and present two talks. The first will be an introduction to new Firebird 2.5 Trace API. The second will bring a practical approach to identifying and solving the most common Firebird performance problems.

I’m working hard to create two interesting, instructive and accessible talks. I have a big ‘thank you’ to Carlos Cantu for the opportunity and an invitation for you.

Come to the 7th Firebird Developers Day in Piracicaba on July the 17th, 2010. You’ll get quality talks on various themes related to Firebird. You’ll get to know in person those forum colleagues you know online only. Plus, you’ll be able to celebrate Firebird’s 10th anniversary. As the largest Firebird event in the world, FDD is not just ‘an’ event it’s ‘the’ event for Firebird users.

Sinática will be physically present at the event’s entrance and Sinática Monitor will be sold at a 50% discount that day only. Get ready and enjoy!

MindTheBird! provides a messaging framework, marketing materials and guidance for Firebird end-users, journalists and even competitors. We encourage all developers and enthusiasts of Firebird to be the part of this very important campaign.

Talk about Firebird to that friend of yours who still relies on MySql. Send some links to that previous boss of yours that insisted you had to work exclusively with expensive databases. Organize a workshop to help your co-workers get started. Let your peers know Firebird is a truly free and mature database server alternative.

EDIT Sep 21st: Sinática Monitor 2.1.03 solves the issue. You may download it now. The original bug in Firebird 2.1.3 is already fixed in CVS too.

If you’ve followed my advice and upgraded to Firebird 2.1.3 only to find you’re now getting consistent “invalid BLOB ID” messages, please update Sinática Monitor to the latest version.

There is a very specific condition that triggers this error message and it’s highly likely you won’t be affected. If you are being affected, however, please check your environment:

In my testing the bug only occurs when there are clients attached using charset NONE. If you change them to use a proper charset such as ASCII, ISO8859_1 or UTF8 the error message will be gone. Any charset different from NONE will do. Also make sure Sinática Monitor is not using NONE charset.

If you run into this error and it’s not related to charset NONE, please contact me. Every additional information will be helpful.

Yesterday Firebird 2.1.3 was made public. As with all maintenance releases its focus is stability. A number of bugs are fixed and it is a recommended update for everyone using older versions of the 2.1 series.

Default authentication method changed

The Release Notes is quick to warn about a change that may break current setups: The default authentication method changed from mixed to native. In practice this means that before 2.1.3 you could use both firebird’s native authentication and windows authentication out of the box.

From now on you have to explicitly tell Firebird that you wish to use windows authentication. Simply change the firebird.conf configuration file to:

Authentication = mixed

Lighter nBackup

Prior to 2.1.3 nBackup could exhaust server I/O resources and negatively affect database operation. Starting from Firebird 2.1.3 nBackup is lighter and can be used even when the database is heavily loaded.

Monitoring Fixes

Some fixes are specially important for Sinática Monitor users and anyone that uses monitoring tables frequently.

Error “cannot transliterate” would happen when trying to read monitoring tables containing data from an attachment using character set NONE.

And there’s news this year: The Madness Session will let the audience ask any questions directly to the speakers. I liked this idea. Everyone knows there will be time to ask their questions.

Another good news is the presence of Vlad Khorsun, one of Firebird’s current main developers. He will present two sessions. One on CTE (Common Table Expressions) and another on What’s new in Firebird 2.5.

There are two presentations by Dmitri Kouzmenko that you just can’t miss. On one of them, entitled “Database maintenance“, he promises to show different tool to monitor the database. Is he going to mention Sinática Monitor? I have no idea.

There are two other presentations from the Brazilian folks that caught my attention: “Database Structure and Organization for websites” by Maurício Longo and “Optimizing Firebird 2.1 queries using Execute Block and nested selects” by Eduardo Jedliczka.

This event is great and I do recommend. I was there last year and certainly I will be there this year. See you!